When I was in college, I bought a pair of red plaid Abercrombie pants that I thought looked like something Gwen Stefani would wear. I wore tissue-thin wife beaters with colored bras and, memorably, a pink vinyl micro-mini skirt that I got at a consignment shop in Providence. I went to a "white trash" party dressed in one of those wife beaters, a pair of overalls, and a trucker hat. I can't remember what the trucker hat said on it, but I do remember drinking PBR.

I relay this information not because I am proud of it. At 31, I find the idea of a bunch of rich college students parodying poor people to be completely offensive. I can't believe my friends let me walk outside the dorm wearing those unfortunate plaid pants. Which is all to say that even though we might cringe at Miley Cyrus's ratchet culture appropriation and omnipresent white leggings, she is 20 years old. We were all trying on different personas and styles and doing embarrassing things when we were 20, trying to figure out what our grown-up identities were going to be.

The difference is that I was 20 in a pre-Instagram, pre-Twitter, pre-Facebook world. And even you youngins who had Facebook in high school had the luxury of making your sartorial and behavioral missteps in relative privacy on your way to maturity. Not so with Cyrus, who has been famous since she was a child and has paparazzi sitting at the gate of her house (literally). She has millions of people telling her how much they preferred the person she was as a child, as if she doesn't have the right to grow and change now that she's not Hannah Montana anymore. She has Sinead O'Connor writing her a condescending open letter and calling her a prostitute of the music industry, just for publicly exploring her sexuality in a provocative way.

For those of you in a yearlong media blackout, Miley Cyrus has been the object of a thousand think pieces and just about as many gifs since her performance at the MTV Video Music Awards in August. She pranced around in her underwear, twerked with giant teddy bears, pantomimed licking the derrière of a 6'7'' black burlesque performer named Amazon Ashley, and stuck her tongue out at least 47 times.

But after reading how Cyrus explains herself in a Rolling Stone cover story, it makes sense that she didn't believe she was exploiting her back-up dancers. They are her friends (they go out to lunch), and they seemed excited about the performance. "I don't keep my producers or dancers around 'cause it makes me look cool…those aren't my 'accessories.' They're my homies," Cyrus said. To wit, the aforementioned Amazon Ashley made an appearance in that Rolling Stone story, and she was depicted giving Cyrus a big warm hug.

What's also worth loving about Miley is that she is in control of her new image. Yes, we might find her choice of clothing and dance moves ridiculous and/or hideous, but it's (almost) empowering to see a child star make her own stylistic and musical choices. We're used to seeing Disney princesses follow the Britney Spears, Amanda Bynes, or Demi Lovato trajectory: Controlled by various male svengalis, sexualized in ways they didn't conceptualize on their own, ultimately crashing and burning in a spectacularly upsetting tabloid fashion.

By contrast, Miley is the one calling the shots. "I wasn't trying to be sexy," she told Rolling Stone about her VMA performance. "If I was trying to be sexy, I could have been sexy. I can dance a lot better than I was dancing." She knows that as a skinny white girl she looks absurd twerking. She knows that her little ponytail horns are creepy. She choose to get naked and swing around on a Wrecking Ball because that's what she is into right now. And considering the amount of chatter she produced with the VMA performance and the number one Billboard spot she secured with "Wrecking Ball," it's what America is into as well.

Think back to your own 20-year-old self. Did you get a stupid tattoo? Did you dye your hair a really regrettable shade of purple? Now, think about the person you've grown into—without the glare of millions of onlookers or the pressure to sell albums—and cut Miley a little slack.